I love these questions that come the moment you aren’t expecting them. “Isn’t designing a website easy?” a new friend asked me.
“You know, with tools like Squarespace, Wix, etc, do people still need web designers?”
I gave kind of a crappy answer at the time. We were at the beach and I had just hiked for about 2 hours in 95 degree weather so I’ll blame heat exhaustion.
But I’ve been thinking more about it. And here’s the answer I want to give. And I am going to intersperse it with emo ‘I don’t need you’ picture quotes, for your amusement and mine.
Because a web designer is not a needed thing… it’s something you want.
Let me explain, yo.
Lil Wayne, and you, don’t need a web designer. For realz.
You don’t hire a web designer because it’s the cheapest option.
Let’s do some numbers here for a sample non-ecommerce site over the course of three years. I’ll use SquareSpace as the DIY option and our sample rates as the web designer option:
| SquareSpace | A web designer | |
| Year One | $192 | $3000 |
| Year Two | $192 | $72 |
| Year Three | $192 | $72 |
| Totals: | $576 | $3144 |
OK so explaining those numbers: Squarespace has a monthly fee of $16/month (if you buy annually). Designing a website with a designer has a lot of up front costs but afterward (assuming you maintain it yourself, which is what you’d do with SquareSpace anyway) you are talking money for web hosting and a domain name (in my case $5/month for web hosting and $12/year for a domain).
There are plenty of DIY website design options. The thing they all have in common? DIY. Do it yourself. In all scenarios, it is you doing it.
If we look at the totals, you aren’t picking a web designer based on costs alone. Then again, not much you do in business is based on costs alone. Proof? For my business sign, I could have gotten a piece of plywood and spray painted some letters on it for probably about $20, including the hanging hardware. Costs are not the only factor for a sign, for a printer, for an anything.
You hire a web designer for convenience, service, and good advice.
Alright so what does SquareSpace not include? Well, it doesn’t include some of the harder parts of website design:
- Ability to make email addresses. They suggest going through Google Apps which, if you have more than one person in your organization, will charge you $5/additional user/month. If you want me to make you 10 email addresses for your company with the hosting package I use, I can do that. You want 50? I can still do that. And yes, if you regularly clean your email off the server, you can likely still use the $5/month web hosting package.
- Ability to manipulate the templates as fully as you may want to. See a design you like and want to change x, y, and z about it? SquareSpace (or whatever company you use) will let you do that only to an extent. I can give someone almost exactly what they want in most cases.
- Ability to have custom features on your site. Here are some things we’ve been able to implement for clients: custom site searches for rental properties, integrating a real estate data feed into the website, make tweets automatically go out from archived blog posts, calendar where you can book appointments, and more. If you want your website to ‘do’ stuff, eventually these plug and play websites may frustrate you.
- Ability to not bash your head on your desk trying to figure something out. Yes, there are website forums and support tickets but just handing something off and saying ‘You deal with it’ has a surprising amount of relief. Also sometimes I can think of something you don’t even know exists to make your life easier online. Really, I know stuff you don’t.
Most things in life aren’t needs.
You can cook your own food so you don’t need restaurants. You can grow your own food so you don’t need grocery stores. You can fill out your own forms so you don’t need an accountant to do your taxes. You can drive your trash to the dump so you don’t need a garbage collector. You get my point.
Doing things that are difficult, tedious, annoying, or just plain time consuming isn’t easy. And for many people, dealing with online stuff feels like at least one item on that list.
We pay for these things and more to get done by other people because:
1) We don’t want to deal with them.
2) We want them handled well.
3) In our minds, we think someone else can do it more efficiently if not better than us.
People pay a higher fee with a web designer to get what they want and to let someone else handle it. SquareSpace people are not our audience.
So while there is a while group of people not needing web designers, internet marketers, and other online professionals, I know there are plenty more who do.
In short, you don’t need a web designer. But, you may find yourself wanting one.